Posted by rpcman on May 15, 1998 at 10:44:34:
In Reply to: Design posted by Coach on May 14, 1998 at 13:34:10:
Your thingy would certainly seem to point to a poor design for the animals it is in that do not use it.
It points to poor design for those who do use it too. Imagine building a car and instead of making a five inch cable from the battery you create a 15 foot cable and wrap it around the steering wheel before finally connecting to where it belongs right next to the battery.
The 'thingy' is called a (recurrent) laryngeal nerve. You can find a discussion of it in Evolution by Mark Ridley, section 13.10. A more detailed analysis can be examined in Strickberger's Evolution.
Some evidences that I feel are compelling are Sexual Reproduction; Lack of Cl in lipids, carbohydrates, and most proteins; Extremely specialized sybiotic relationships; use of Oxygen instead of Nitrogen;use of CO2 instead of Nitrogen; no Silicon based life discovered yet, Statistical likelyhood of several beneficial mutations happening at once, etc.
How are any of these evidence of design? Sexual reproduction, like the human eye and the laryngeal nerve, is evidence for natural selection. See Ridley's book, Chapter 11 for the reasons.